Thursday, January 5

No one wants to watch a movie in which the director yells “Lights, Camera…Multiple Choice Question” We are more excited with movies directed with the words “Lights, Camera, Action.” Multiple choice questions don’t reflect reality. In real-life we are seldom confronted with a multiple choice question, we are confronted with problems, decisions, and the need to be innovative. Not the need to choose the best answer out of four choices.

Action is what we want, it is what motivates humans. Kids can’t sit still, they need to move. We want to watch sports with activity and movement. Our jobs demand active thinking, complex decision making, and activity. Why should our learning design be inactive? Why should our online courses start with something as boring and pedantic as a learning objective? Why do we commonly create instruction with the page-of-text, page-of-text, page-of-text, multiple-choice-question format?

For the month of January as the New Year kicks off, I want learning and development professionals to think about action, activity, and innovation. I want us to make a conscious effort to force learners to do something. ..anything to get them mentally or even physically moving. Challenge your learners to interact with the e-learning and classroom instruction that you create.

Here are three tips to help you get started; some are borrowed from the field of video games which is an awesome place to look for inspiration for learning and development professionals. A term I like to use (while some others don’t) is gamification. We need to add gamification to our learning—more about that in a subsequent post.

So here is the list:

First

Start your learning with a challenge instead of a list of objectives or a lecture.Rather than state, “there are three things you should know about fraudulent claims”—start the training with, the statement “A potentially fraudulent claim has just been filed, you have 20 screens and 30 minutes to learn what to do. Proceed with caution.” As the challenge unfolds and you provide information to the learner, you should be providing more and more learning opportunities, introduce the fraud detection worksheet.Incorporate policy points into the feedback you provide the learner, add in exceptions. Too many courses are too easy. Yes, I said it…too easy. Humans don’t like or respect tasks that are too easy. Yet too many learning courses are built to the lowest common denominator. Create courses that challenger learners, they’ll learn more, remember more and, as a result, be able to do more.

Second

Create training where more than one answer is possible, feasible, and acceptable. Rarely in life are answers cut and dried. There are typically shades of gray that must be dealt with and reconciled. In most e-learning, there are absolutely right and absolutely wrong answers.How does that prepare a learner for what she will encounter on the job? Present a situation where the customer is half-right and half-wrong…what do you do? Or an ethical situation which is filled with gray. Training needs to be more nuanced than its current form. Provide alternative endings, provide different levels of “correct” …don’t keep giving one right answer.

Thir Third

Force the learners to perform the activity they are learning about. Make them enter a customer order, make them calm down an irate customer, make them close out an account. Make them operate the machinery. If you want someone to learn to do something, they must practice doing it! We can’t tell them about being a good leader and then hope they’ll be a good leader, they have to practice being a good leader, or sales person or accountant. Practice is needed to improve performance. Athletes don’t just read about competition, they practice, work on fundamentals, play scrimmages, and then perform. In training situations, the learner reads about negotiation skills, takes a multiple choice test about negotiation skills, and then is asked to go negotiate with a customer.That’s it--no practice, no scrimmage. Immediately they go to the real thing. This is not good.

So, as the New Year starts, think about what you, as a learning and development professional, can do to engage the people for whom you are building instruction. Don’t passively hand them content, instead make them do something in 2012. Your action item from this post is to create at least one challenge or action oriented activities for your learners in the next 3 months.

8 comments:

Thanks Karl,this New Year challenge is very thoughtful, and really not that difficult to achieve... once you are in the right designing mindset!I definitely think we need to define what "gamification" means to learning development. There are video game principles that can be applied to e-learning, but I still see many "game" variables added to learning which diminish the ultimate goal - have someone be able to do something after they complete your course- and not just be able to recall the definitions of words in a timed crossword game.

I think that much of the time students just want to get handson with there jobs. electrician training courses provide students with that physical challenge that sitting behind a desk doesn't always provide.

I will be sure to implement these changes into the classroom. As you were referring to students making decisions without cut and dry answers, I could not help to think about the importance of critical thinking. I don't think that there is a strong enough emphasis on decision making skills in our school districts. According to Crenshaw, Hale, & Harper "When people actively apply critical thinking concepts and use constructive behaviors, they develop more ideas, make fewer mistakes and reach better decisions. But when people act on beliefs they have not carefully thought through, they will shoot down ideas even before they are understood, or take action based upon faulty assumptions (2011, p. 2). This is great insight to help our future leaders in their thought process and decision making. It will help our students develop skills to comprehend information more effectively.

Crenshaw, P., Hale, E., & Harper, S. L. (2011). Producing Intellectual Labor In The Classroom: The Utilization Of A Critical Thinking Model To Help Students Take Command Of Their Thinking. Journal Of College Teaching & Learning, 8(7), 13-26.

Anna, thanks for your comment and you make an excellent point, there is still mis-application of game-ideas, game-thinking or gamificaiton...whatever its called but, when applied correctly, there are many advantages. We just need to keep working at it. Have a great new year!

Mark, yes, electrician training courses are important and when hands-on components are added can be very effective for teaching skills need to be an electrician. When the job calls for action and activity, the training should reflect the same action and activity.

Subscribe To

Follow by Email

About the LC Blog

The LC Blog is a community feature that Learning Circuits launched in 2002. The main feature of the LC Blog is its Question of the Month, which hones in on a priority topic facing learning professionals. Anyone--and everyone--can contribute to the LC Blog.

Search This Blog

Loading...

About Learning Circuits

ASTD launched Learning Circuits in January 2000. Its goal was to promote and aid the use of e-learning, creating a body of knowledge about how to use technology efficiently and effectively for learning. There are nearly 800 articles currently on the website.

About ASTD

ASTD (American Society for Training & Development) is the world’s largest association dedicated to workplace learning and performance professionals. ASTD is dedicated to providing resources to practitioners working the field of e-learning. ASTD delivers the free webzine Learning Circuits, the ASTD TechKnowledge Conference & Exposition; two educational certificate programs on e-learning design; and numerous books and Infolines.